Turning on the ILLUMINATE15 Spotlight

People in nearly every IT user community look for an opportunity to connect: To share experiences, to learn from subject-matter experts how to get the most out of their tools, to discover “like minds.” So I am excited to announce a conference for Druva users, coming this fall.

I joined Druva last year, for a bunch of reasons: a great product, strong team, and the opportunity to help build what I believe will become a major software company in the cloud era.

But I didn’t make my choice based solely on dispassionate reasons. When I began looking at the company, I contacted people in my network who were using Druva’s products. I was struck by how enthusiastic these individuals were. “Love” is not a word one typically associates with software, but love Druva they did. They loved that the products “just worked” as advertised, with minimal disruption to end users and ease for administrators to roll out. They loved that Druva’s software allowed them to make more use of their users’ backed up data, so that they could use it for ediscovery and address governance requirements. And my contacts loved working with the company, telling me they had experienced some of the best support ever from a software company. The enthusiasm was contagious. A few weeks later, I found myself a new Druvaite.

Druva is still a young company, albeit a rapidly growing one, and as a result has offered limited opportunities for its customers to interact and engage with the company beyond more standard support and sales situations. As Druva’s new marketing head, I wanted to see if the enthusiasm I experienced would translate into a desire for greater interaction opportunities. In early December we surveyed our customers, asking about their interest to participate in an activity where we could physically bring customers together to share endpoint data protection and governance best practices, participate in hands-on training, discuss product futures and more. The response was overwhelmingly in support of the idea; and with that, ILLUMINATE15 was born.

Today we’re announcing Druva’s inaugural user conference, ILLUMINATE15, to be held this fall at Santana Row in the heart of Silicon Valley, October 12-14. The two-day conference is meant for IT professionals who use Druva to come together to learn and share pragmatic tips and best practices, industry trends, and future Druva directions. The conference will be preceded by an optional half-day of hands on-training for those who want to learn how to administer and use Druva products.

Starting a user conference is a big milestone for any company. It signifies that the company is of sufficient size and has generated sufficient enthusiasm for its products and services – enough to warrant the large cost and undertaking a multi-day conference entails. From what I’ve seen since joining the company and even before, that time has come and is now.